The 2003 film "The Elephant" was directed by Gus Van Sant based on the Columbine school shooting that took place in the United States in April 1999, and was filmed in the form of a pseudo-documentary. In the years following that incident, there have been many more school shootings in the United States, drawing attention and discussion of issues such as school bullying, sexual orientation discrimination, gun control, violent video games, and juvenile delinquency. Prior to this, these issues were like "the elephant in the room", and people were collectively silent and indifferent to these obvious facts and avoided talking about them. The title of the movie also implies this.
What caused this tragedy to happen? Being bullied and treated coldly by classmates on campus? Neglect or mishandling by schools and educators? Absence of parent and home education? Mental problems of two high school murderers? The director didn't give us an answer, and the footage of the film was like a window, calmly showing the audience what happened in this high school.
The filming method of the film is very special. The director selects a few characters as the main observation object pov, uses a lot of long shots, follows and follows their movements, and uses the method of cross montage to carry out multi-linear narrative, and the plots overlap each other, so that the same What happened in time is reproduced and repeated in each pov perspective, making time seem to enter into an infinite cycle. In the first 60 minutes of the film, these seemingly trivial daily life on campus are actually the foreshadowing carefully arranged by the director. For gradually numb adults, these high school lives are relatively simple and insipid, but for high school students, it is a unique experience, they have a youthful yearning unique to this age, sensitive, lonely and rebellious. So when the shooting happened at the end of the film, when I looked back and thought about the previous content, I realized that this accidental incident had an inevitable reason.
While driving back to school with his father, John talked about hunting and guns. He was reprimanded by the principal, Mr McFarland, and secretly wept alone.
Elias’s favorite photography often represents a powerful intervention with a stranger, and the camera is aimed at the person like a gun.
Nathan is admired by female students, and his girlfriend Carrie is envied. Carrie once slapped other female classmates for Nathan, showing the possessiveness and exclusivity in love.
The three female students B, J, and N next to them talked about their gossip, and then they talked about the topic of private chats being interfered by their parents. They are also not harmonious, and will quarrel to prove their friendship.
Acadia attends Gay Alliance conference to discuss how to identify gay people on the street. Is it a little disrespectful to the LGBT community to be stared at like this?
Michelle has an old-fashioned hairstyle, is introverted, has low self-esteem, and is shy about her body. She is a nerd type, so she is ridiculed behind her back by other classmates.
Eric, one of the shooters, was thrown a cake by his classmates in class. He chose to endure the bullying and exclusion, while Nathan and Acadia and other classmates watched with indifference. This is cold violence. After that, Eric observed and took notes around the cafeteria, making plans that no one knew about. At home, he was playing Beethoven's "To Alice" and "Moonlight" sonatas, as the camera scanned the room arrangement, the walls covered with magical paintings.
Another gunman, Alex, came to him, bought a gun online, and played a CS-like shooting game. In the game, Alex shot and killed the walking NPC from behind, which immediately echoed the long shot of the first 60 minutes of the film, and made the subsequent long shot that reappeared like a nightmare. The synchronised piano sounds also deeply reveal loneliness and violence. Eric and Alex watched a Nazi documentary together, showing "The German people can only see what the ruler wants them to know, propaganda is the weapon of the ruling phase". Longing for freedom and resisting totalitarianism are always the political demands of teenagers. The LGBT episode echoes earlier discussions about homosexuality as Eric and Alex kiss in the shower to try their hand at love before they die, before planning the shooting.
The above seemingly isolated plots that generally exist in real life are gradually intertwined and condensed through the film's lens language organization, accumulating strength, pointing to the subsequent shooting tragedy, resulting in violent results. Although the shooting scene at the end of the movie is calm and not bloody, it is very impactful because of the psychological hints of the previous content, and the feeling of killing is so real that it is suffocating.
Eric and Alex didn't tell the audience why they killed, maybe "have fun" in their own words, but the audience can get a glimpse of the material in front of the movie and get their own answers, so as to participate in the expression of the movie , which is the brilliance of this film.
The shooting techniques and inspiration in this film came from British director Alan Clark's 1989 short film "The Elephant" of the same name. It was a film made up of a dozen or so pointless, unrelated murder scenes. Every scene from the killer's intervention, murder, and the victim's death is basically a follow-up long shot. The camera is calm, but the killer walks fast but full of irritability. I also have this senseless, rampant way of walking, where a person moves with intuition for unknown reasons, without a clear goal, without giving himself time to stop, without giving himself a chance to think, trying to fight against inherent habits and social norms, Express mental stress in this way. Truffaut's 4-minute run shot to a bewildered Antoine at the end of "The Four Hundred Blows" is the same release. And its ultimate expression and release form is the murderous passage of Clark's film. Gus Van Sant also used this long shot in The Elephant.
This film basically only uses ambient sound effects to enhance the sense of reality. The only soundtrack used is Beethoven's "To Alice" and "Moonlight" played by Eric, which is both realistic and functional. Classical music, especially German-Austrian music, has been used in scenes of violence since Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. For example, in films such as Apocalypse Now, The Silence of the Lambs, The Seven Deadly Sins, and There Will Be Blood Mysterious, joyful, rigorous, rebellious and other colors. In reality, Hitler particularly liked Wagner's operas, which are also a typical example of the connection between violence and classical music. In addition, John has a walking scene in the film that pays homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey", and Eric's "bit bug" line when he threatened Nathan and Carrie in the freezer comes from the movie "Born to Kill" written by the ruffian Quentin.
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